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Dec 8 Pentecostal Power in South Africa (full text speech)

Dr. Schlemmer presented his research to the “Media & Religion” conference in Johannesburg, 11-12 November, 2008.

Thank you very much, Reverend. I appreciate very much this opportunity to talk about this research.

Just before I start, perhaps by way of introduction, and to touch on
one of the themes posed in the questions posed at the end of the last
session where people were talking about this disjuncture, this split,
between the secular world of politics and the world of faith
communities.

Now, in these surveys, in both the surveys because one was done in
Cape Town and one was done in Gauteng, I started off with a question,
very broad and open question, which was in a sense a trick question.
But I wanted to see how Christians would respond. And that was a
question on what do you feel is necessary to achieve a better life for
all for yourself?

Now as you know, the largest political party in the country - we
assume it's still the largest - with all good intentions had this
as its slogan: A Better Life for All. And since then, this slogan has
acquired a significance and an impact far beyond the realm of party.
And now people tend to associate politics with a better life for all,
and even supporters of other parties will use these words in
interviews: a better life for all.

But they then associate it with political programs. So here we were
interviewing a representative sample of Christians in Cape Town and in
Gauteng and we posed this question. And 95% of them immediately slotted
into the political mindset. And they'd say, "Oh, a better life for
all. Right. We want this. We want roads. This and that, taxes." And
so you got the entire political agenda being played back. It was all
very interesting.

But I wanted to see whether people who are devout and with strong
faith would say, "Hold on. The politicians might say that a better
life for all is better delivery, etc. But actually I've got a
different view about a 'better life' for myself and for all," and
to introduce the religious agenda. But nobody did.

Because everybody assumed that politics has its place, and tha's
secular. And you don't think about your own spiritual values or
anything like that. You don't think of the need to express your
spirituality in the life you're leading. No, you immediately think in
the categories that have been given to you by the politicians - all
the politicians, doesn't matter which party.

So when we got to the next question, which immediately went onto
religious topics, the people would say, "Oh, this interview is not
about politics." No, no it's not. "Oh, well, then, I would have
answered the question completely differently." So even the most
devout people, with deep faith, lapsed into the political agenda
without so much as a hint of their own real agendas.
Now I think that's some of what the questioners were getting at.
There is a strange kind of separation between the secular world of
politics and the world of categories, goals, commitments that - not
most perhaps, but many - religious people have. And the debates in
the country do not bring them together sufficiently.

And I think I detected in some of the questions that this is a
concern. And it is indeed a concern. I think that I personally
respected the idea of a secular state that is neutral, but then it has
to be neutral in its ideologies as well. Unfortunately, and this is
difficult, you can't expect politicians to be neutral.

So there's a huge dilemma in society between the secular state and
the kind of state that communities of faith would like. And how to
bridge these two is one of the most complex questions that I can
imagine.

Now having said that, it certainly helped me in doing these surveys
to think more about this dilemma. I was asked
to do this research by the Center for Development and Enterprise. And,
perhaps by way of introduction, I could just tell you why they became
involved in this and asked me to do it.

The sociologist Peter Berger, a very famous American sociologist who
started off as an Austrian sociologist many years ago, became
interested in Max Weber, one of the greatest sociologists the world has
known. And Max Weber was particularly interested in the effects on the
economy and community life and development in 19th Century Europe of
Calvinism.

Max Weber wrote this very great treatise, The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism. He was not implying in that title that there
was anything Christian about capitalism, necessarily, or that
Christianity was capitalist or anything like that. But what he unpacked
there was the fact that through a particular interpretation of their
faith, the Calvinists in Switzerland, Germany, Scotland and elsewhere,
and in parts of France where there were Hugenot communities, had
somehow interpreted their faith in the context of the day-to-day world
in such a way as to release an enormous amount of energy for other
pursuits, including become very successful entrepreneurs.

Now, these entrepreneurs were very special entrepreneurs. They were
not like the kind of people who have very recently landed the entire
world in a dreadful problem, with the threat of recession and massive
deaths from starvation due to greed and profiteering on Wall Street
with derivative investments and sub-prime loans. That's not the kind
of capitalism they were talking about. They were talking of
independent, entrepreneurial spirit, where people would marshal the
energies of the commitments as individuals and, with utter fairness and
respect for their customers, deliver a good service and become very
successful business people and eventually build very great companies.
One these was the first really big multi-national company in the world,
the Dutch East India Company, which then veered off the track, you see.
It became involved in all sorts of dubious pursuits.

But happily it started a way station in the camp, which contributed to South Africa's development.

Peter Berger and other sociologists have discovered that something
with very much the same kind of impact, the same kind of release of
energy, has happened in association with the growth of the Pentecostal
movement in Latin America, in South Korea, in parts of India, in
Africa, and in fact in many, many parts of the world.

Can I just say that the early Calvinists had a particular
interpretation that made this release of energy possible. And many of
you will know this better than I do. I had to think hard back to Sunday
School to remember the details. And that is that the Calvinists in that
particular era had a dreadful need and an anxiety to be reassured that
they were part of the "elect" of the Lord. And being part of the
elect of God was obviously a major focus and commitment in their lives.

In the middle class communities of Switzerland, Holland, Germany,
and Scotland, and more or less in the same time in America, they then
said, "being respectable, a model citizen, and being a successful
citizen is one way, perhaps, God is reassuring me that I am likely to
be among the elect of God." But of course they would never know,
because it is impossible to know for sure that you are in the elect of
God.

And so it generated this anxiety, and this anxiety made people feel
all the more concerned to be examples of success. And it was this
anxiety that produced the energy, which was a theological anxiety. It
was an anxiety about people's relationship to the Lord. And that kind
of reaction is absolute dynamite.

Economists can prattle on and on and on about what is required of
development in the world, and it never occurs the them that some of the
most dramatic impacts on development have occurred not because of
economic processes, but because of the results and consequences of
religious experiences.

Now how do the Pentecostals fit into this mold? How does the
experience of faith intersect with and influence social and economic
processes? How does it affect people at the level of religious
consciousness, lifestyles, among congregants, pastors and other
Christians? What implications does the experience of faith in the
religious community have for socio-economic progress?

Now this is particularly important in South Africa because we have
what we can refer to as a massive alienated sector. People are
unemployed. They have no purchase. They feel that they have no role in
society. They spend their time looking for things to occupy themselves
with, things to give themselves meaning. One of those things,
unfortunately, is an extraordinary level of crime.

And quite frankly, and particularly at the moment, there is little
policy or growth prospects in South Africa that can reabsorb this
massive army of unemployed people. So the people have reached the
conclusion that the main hope in this life is the people themselves.
You can't look to government to rescue people from alienation.

And this means developing confidence and initiative for self-help
within the social fabric. And the big question is what part can
religion play?

With regard to the Pentecostal and Charismatic church - now,
ladies and gentleman, I bear no particular grief for the Pentecostal
churches. I am very sympathetic, but I am sympathetic to all churches,
and other religious movements - I think the Pentecostal and
Charismatic churches have attracted the attention of sociologists for
the following reason: they are growing most rapidly among all levels
and communities in society.

One of the religions that is growing very rapidly is Islam, and many
people think that because Islam is growing more rapidly than Christian
faiths, as a whole, that Islam is the fastest-growing religion. Well,
within the Christian community of faith, the Pentecostals are growing
far more rapidly than Islam.

That's the first reason. The second reason is that they have a
known ability to imbue followers with a very great intensity of
spirituality and commitment.

Thirdly, we are seeing particularly with the emergence of new
churches - some of the older Pentecostal churches have become very
established congregations - some of the new churches have a great
deal of flexibility and organizational flexibility and have shown quite
a degree of entrepreneurship themselves.

Fourthly, the pervasive effect of religion and religious
organization on society. Now I ought to, as a sociologist, say that
while your undergraduate sons and daughters at universities may prattle
on endlessly about Karl Marx and his impact on society, the impact of
religious activity, faith, on economic development and society far out
strokes anything that the secular ideologies would promote and conceive
of. And this (is so) throughout history, for the last many thousands of
years.

In doing this research, I worked with and drew on international
studies by Peter Berger, David Martin and others. The results I'm
going to give you are based on sample surveys in Hout Bay, Gauteng. I
chose Hout Bay because it has a large number of new Pentecostal
churches, very small, not all of them in church buildings, and
there's also a face-to-face community where different categories of
the population come face to face and interact and people are not
segregated into townships that are over the hill and out of site. They
all live together, at least within talking distance of one another,
sometimes shouting distance, unfortunately. But it's all there in one
place. And so I thought it was a good place to start.

And we did intensive interviews among congregants in various
communities. We included all the churches. We did interviews among
Pentecostal businessmen, political role players. There were more than
ten varied research inputs.

The context of the research is that South African churches are
becoming more responsive to bottom-up needs. There are more and more
overlaps and commonalities between the churches.

When I began doing research, which you'll see from my appearance
was a long, long time ago - it feels like it was before the Great
Trek - going in you could identify whether you were talking to a
person from a Catholic congregation, or an Anglican congregation, or a
Dutch Reformed church or congregation. It is now very different. The
commonalities and the mutual influences have been so great that the
differences today are really in size and in stages of formalization and
in quality of faith, not in lifestyles. Therefore, it is very difficult
to produce clear-cut findings.

The Pentecostal-church types that we investigated, the boundaries
are not clear cut, but the study has covered. And you will know more
about the boundaries than I do. The New Charismatics, some of them in
small churches. The mega-churches. The community-based churches, which
are not particularly charismatic but are Pentecostal in their basic
outlook and in commitments. And then the older, classical Pentecostal
churches, the Assemblies of God, the big, established Pentecostal
churches.

And we also looked at the members of other congregations as well and
asked them questions. We included the African Independent Churches,
which show an interesting blend of influences, some of those influences
are also Pentecostal.

Now, reluctantly in South Africa, we must accept that there are
differences in the culture of worship between the townships and the
suburbs. By that I don't mean that there are differences in the
culture of worship between white people and black people. The suburbs
are no longer all white, and certainly in Hout Bay, the townships are
certainly not all black.

So there's great diversification taking place, but nevertheless,
we detected very large differences between the suburbs - which you
can say are areas that are tending to be middle class - and the
townships where there are fewer people tending to be middle class.

The conclusions from all the studies. First of all, South Africa's
current political debate affects the attitudes of all people. Hence,
that's why I asked that first question, what is a better life for
all? And people jumped into the political categories.

But among church-goers I soon found in our interviews that the
political categories are far more superficial and they do not invade
their consciousness to the same extent as they would invade highly
secularized, left-leaning people of a Marxist or socialist bent, or
other people of a secular orientation. The political categories are in
a sense kept in their place by the Christian congregant moreso than
among secular people.

Another thing that we found is that religious commitment in general - and this is without distinguishing between Pentecostals, between
Reformed churches, between Catholics, whatever - imparts a buoyant
mood and spiritual capital. In other words, people have more spiritual
resources, which means that they have more emotional resources. And
they find it easier to cope with a whole range of problems than people
who do not have religious commitment.

One of the early findings in Hout Bay, for example, where there were
particular conflicts underway - there were labor conflicts and
conflicts between the government and the fisherman, all sorts of
complications - the people who were calmest, most constructive, and
who eventually provided solutions to these conflicts tended to come
from religious communities. Not in religious roles. They were not
pastors acting as pastors but pastors in other roles who provided
leadership in very stressed situations.

So these things seem to be correlated with social capital,
confidence, patience and fortitude. Religion seemed to us to insulate
from political and economic stress and passions, sometimes due to a
kind of otherworldly withdrawal and asceticism. But the vast majority
of Christians, including Pentecostals, without this withdrawal or
fatalism were still able to respond to society, to respond to issues
within society. They were much cooler about many issues that secular
people were becoming very excited about.

The broader mindsets we found were that churchgoers reflect a flavor
of self-reliance rather than dependence or entitlement. For that
reason, many of the people, after my first question about a better life
for all, when they realized that the interview was not about politics,
they would say, "But why on earth should the government provide us
with a better life for all. That is up to us. It is between us and our
fellow human beings. Or it's between us and God. The government must
provide services, but they can't pretend to provide a better life for
people. Let's just make sure they do their job properly."

So there was a greater flavor of self-reliance. What we found is
that signs of acute political aggravation were most common among
secular people who said they never went to church or were not
churchgoers or not Christians, not anything in particular - not
Hindus, not Muslims, whatever.

So what we found in general with religion today is certainly not
what Karl Marx said it was, and that is a form of alienated
consciousness, a soporific, something that puts people to sleep, a drug
that takes people's mind off the real world and the most important
issues.

It's not a soporific. It does not produce false consciousness. But
it does seem to cushion society from the harsh current realities and
foibles of politicians.

The pastors in particular that we interviewed quite commonly
expressed what they called, and some pastors merely referenced this, a "theology of encounter": the experience of St. Paul on the road to
Damascus, the revelation. Now this message is very positive and
affirming within congregations, and it seemed to be a theme that the
pastors came back to quite frequently. We also found among the pastors
that, because of the flexibility, there was an entrepreneurial quality
to church building.

What we found is that in many of the community churches, the smaller
churches where the pastors are more isolated and where they don't
seem to interact with other pastors to be able to formulate guidelines
and approaches, there was an uncertainly about outreach and social
involvement. And many of the pastors in the small community churches
were saying, "We live here in a sea of crime, in a sea of social
decay. And the best I can do is to try to protect my community, my
congregants, from being influenced. And that's about all we can do.
We're trying to survive in a sea of social decay, in a sea of often
criminal hostility. You can't expect us to go out and do good works
among the very people we fear might harm us."

These were honest confessions by people in little churches,
community churches, who felt that they had to maintain a space for the
religious experience.

Now the congregants was where we found some of the most dramatic
differences. If you look at the one question, How happy are you? Taking
the people that were very happy, you'll see that among the old
Pentecostals in the suburbs, 13% said they were "very happy." The
New Pentecostals: 44%; mainstream churchgoers, who are generally more
affluent than the old Pentecostals, and perhaps that's why they were
happier.

Separatists, we didn't find many in the suburbs. Not enough to analyze.

But in the townships, you'll see the distinct tendency there for
personal happiness to be higher among the new Pentecostal churches than
among the other categories of the congregation.

In answers to the questions, it turned out that nearly six out of
ten of the new Pentecostals in the suburbs felt that their personal
skills and abilities had improved with their growth and religious
development. And here again, you can see the same tendency appearing in
the townships.

A very large official server started for the advertising industry
where they asked all sorts of questions about adverts, and readership
and purchases and things like that. And they placed people in what they
called "NSM" categories, lifestyle categories, from one to ten, the
top categories being the most successful. And then we were able to
correlate that with religious affiliation.

And one of the remarkable things - you know, many people say today
that one of the greatest single causes of dramatic success of the
modern South Africa has been black-empowerment policy and affirmative
action, and it's produced a new middle class very rapidly. And yes,
it's had positive effects. But when you look at results like this,
particularly results under the Pentecostal movement, you'll see that
the impact of Pentecostalism on shifting people up the socio-economic
ladder, up the ladder of lifestyle categories, has been more dramatic
than any other development in society.

It certainly has empowered more people on a more diversified and
widespread basis than any black-empowerment policy crafted by some
sector of industry or whatever. Quite frankly, many statisticians have
remarked in these large surveys that there's almost no recent
movement that can compare with the impact Pentecostalism seen on a mass
basis.

One of the findings throughout comparing the different congregations - the mainline churches, the Pentecostals, the Catholics, whatever - the Pentecostal/charismatic congregants displayed the highest
intensity of spiritual engagement. On all the measures we gave, they
came through as the most intense in their spirituality.

Among black people in the new congregations, there was the most
intense spirituality and less engagement with the world. As a matter of
fact, I would say that political parties might have a problem here
because people were saying, "Don't talk to me about politics. I'm
really not in the least bit interested."

They are very altruistic. They do believe in being Good Samaritans
and helping as far as they can. They are happy and self-confident. They
do, however, have some reserve with strangers and non-believers. They
have the feeling that they are dangerous. In a sense, the danger of sin
is "out there", and you have to be very, very careful about it. And
living in some of the areas in which they live, you can understand
that.

But they are completely devoted to the spiritual enrichment of their
children, and the families there have very great stability and
strength.

In the suburbs, the new Pentecostals, many, are well-educated. They
are not all whites, not by any means. Many are well-educated, and edge
towards progressive thinking on welfare. They have a fair interest in
politics. They could talk politics very fluently in the interviews.
They value education very highly. They are also optimistic and
confident. For them, spiritual goals have utter priority, however. And
there is this quality of spiritual arousal. It's an excitement that
you can see in people's eyes.

Not only me, but many of our interviewers who have done thousands
and thousands of interviews on all topics all over the country and in
the rest of Africa, came back to me and said, "You know, somehow
it's the expression in people's eyes - the sparkle - that
struck us in this particular survey."

In the suburbs, they do derive satisfaction from material
advancement. They are proud of their economic achievements. They're
proud of managing their domestic economies well. But they're not
economically ambitious. They're not hungry or greedy to become rich.

Both in the suburbs and in Hout Bay, the Pentecostals seemed to be
released from stress. In some senses, they are quite laid back. It was
because some of the things that are hugely stressful to people meant so
little to them. For that reason, they seem to cope more quickly with
the world.

However, the idealism has boundaries, just like the township areas
and the small churches. They are very doubtful about too much contact
with strangers, and they do have a certain aversion to the sinfulness
around them. And that produces an almost Puritannical moral code. And
many people in, say, the Catholic Church would say, in informal asides
to us, "The Pentecostal people just reject the people that we really
care about. The poor. The suffering. People among whom we're doing
good works. The Pentecostals don't want to get to know those
people."

This is seen as a lack of sympathy, but it wasn't. It was a sort of self-protective withdrawal.

We found in general that the effect of faith in boosting
self-confidence, self-esteem, and strengthening personal agency and
determination was quite dramatic across all categories of Christians.
This is the act of faith. I'm not talking about that proportion of
passive Christians that go to church only once or twice a year, if they
go at all. These were active Christians.

One of the characteristics was a more harmonious work, family and
other relationships. There seemed to be a greater self-discipline with
regard to drugs, alcohol, sex and other temptations. And there was a
kind of quasi-Calvinist pattern of deferred gratification. In other
words, don't spend all your money now. Rather, invest it wisely.
Marshal your energies so that you can do things better and have more
effect.

And most certainly, tithing enters into this because people felt
that tithing was a spiritual investment. But it provided them with a
model of saving in other respects, as well. In other words, it's
almost as if tithing gave it a greater impact to putting money aside
for larger purposes, for constructive purposes.

As a result of all these things, there's something no doubt in our
interviews. We found improved occupational success and improved work
ethic. There was enormous emphasis on the importance education for
themselves and for their children.

There was an improvement in health. And this is most spectacular.
One of the biggest scourges of poverty in South Africa among poor
people is ill health. They generally get sicker much more often than
people who are not poor. And with the result that ill health was a
reason why many people switched to Pentecostal churches or to churches
that there was some form of faith healing, the testimony throughout
was, "I never looked back. My health has improved consistently."

They held stern, conservative values in terms of public morality,
and a criticism of the government stance on capital punishment,
abortion, gay rights, progressive-rights issues. And the voluntary work
among the poor, in the Pentecostal movement as opposed to some of the
mainline churches, was mainly contained within the church community.

So onto my final thoughts on this. I'm not suggesting that these
issues that I've investigated here are the reason why religious faith
is important. Religious faith is important anyway, quite irrespective,
and we know why. In addition to that spiritual value, Pentecostal
commitment would appear to release energy for social or economic
development. It seems to be a counter to the opportunism and
over-politicization of issues in South Africa, because I do think we
over-politicize most issues.

And it is very difficult to reconcile the rhetoric and the realities
of public life with the commitment and needs of churchgoers. So it
would seem to me that in our secular life, there is - and I believe
that the rationality for this comes originally from St. Thomas Aquinas - a God-shaped hole in our public life. And while I don't expect or
want the government to take sides in religion, and I want it to remain
neutral. I do think it must create more space in its own rhetoric and
in its own education of children through the schools and other
agencies, for spiritual expression.

If one looks at, for example, the service and the things that are
spoken about in social studies and primar schools today, in terms of
the new curriculum, you'll find remarkably little space given to
spiritual commitment. It is almost as if social structure crowds out
spirituality and social experience. And that is what I mean by a "God-shaped" hole in our public life.

Now churches have a role in welfare provision. But welfare cannot be
the end and be-all of their commitments. And one has to weigh it out,
depending on the circumstances of different congregations and say, "Look, these people are struggling to rescue themselves, and you
can't expect them to go on an outreach." But other people have far
more resources, have already developed the confidence, and they can.

But whatever the case, there would be a great deal of sense in
church-based development clubs with some form of coordination between
individual churches and congregations, or maybe between faiths.

But I think that the Pentecostal churches should go on doing what
they are already doing so well: protecting the social fabric from
further decay, giving people who are otherwise sidelined in our society
a powerful sense of purpose and mission. And they do, in this role,
deserve more recognition. And the churches also deserve more respect
because when politicians get up and promote and pronounce their
grandiose ideologies and schemes and plans, they need to just make more
space for another world of plans and commitments that they do not have
the right to transgress.

Thank you.

TRANSCRIPT OF Q&A

Question: I'm interested to find out about the political
influence of Pentecostal churches. Did you find whether there was any
interest in political involvement or even support for holding
accountable those Christians that are in positions of power?

Answer: There was much more interest among the middle-class
Pentecostals than among the poorer people. As a matter of fact, the
majority of poor Pentecostals indicated to us that they don't vote,
and they don't really like interacting with politicians and
activists. Now this could be because they are not as confident as
middle-class Pentecostals.

But certainly there was a great deal of interest among middle-class
Pentecostals, both black and white, but they were far less inclined to
talk in political categories. Far less. People often take a political
party as their base in the world from which they will then dispense
their wisdom on politics and development. Pentecostals certainly did
not do that. There is no great identification with any particular
political party. I would suspect that most of them in the end vote ANC
than vote for other parties, simply because that is the general trend.
There is a kind of commitment in that direction. They do have very
distinct attitudes on aspects of political life.

You remember that [the government] convened a group on "moral
regeneration." That seems to me to be politically very empty. Now if
the government were to allow that facilitation to the done by the
churches or the religious movements, communities of faith, it would at
least not be getting in the way of it. Quite frankly, there is very
little impact from the political sector on moral activity however much
people may go on tirades against corruption, that we all agree with.
There seems to be a singular inability for government to project itself
in this moral view.

And this is what these Pentecostals felt very strongly. They felt
that government was failing, even though they didn't expect
government to become the same congregation that they were. They felt
that it was failing faith in general.

Question: What does this have to do with the media?

It has a lot to do with the media. I was once asked to do an
exercise with a very large newspaper. I won't say which newspaper
since it was confidential. I was interacting quite a lot with the
journalists and editors and the executives on directions to go. And
there was a singular blindness among the journalists to the fact that
among, perhaps not a majority of people, but at least 30-40% of South
Africans religion is very important.

And ever time the topic of religion or religious articles or a
lesson from the scriptures in the paper on a particular day. Whenever
that issue came up the journalists seemed to take the attitude that, "Well, you know, that's not really relevant. We need to get to the
real issues! What are we going to do about this or that, and you know
it was everything from unemployment to global warming."

And I just felt that there was a singular blindness, and religion is
actually a vital aspect of community life. If I organize a debate on
democracy, they will cover it. But if I organize a debate on something
to do with the religious commitments of people in a certain area, I
doubt the newspapers would arrive at all.

I don't think it's the fault of government, but there is a
secular tendency in the newspapers, which you find in the universities.
And the university is probably where it starts, before the newspapers,
because in your second-year student community you already have this
huge swing toward a secular outlook.

So it's the degree to which the media is alert to the importance
of religion that is the main issue I have in mind. I don't have
solutions as to what they should say. But they should become more
interested.

Question: How is the causal relationship established between Pentecostalism and socio-economic advancement?

In our surveys we asked the same questions of all people, and then
we divided them into them into religious categories. Then, within those
religious categories, we divided them into people with different
intensity of religion on the basis of our observations. And we found
differences in the categories.

You'll recall that media-products research that I showed you. They
asked a whole lot of questions, and put people in lifestyle categories
across the board. And they've been tracking these categories over the
past few years.

We came and discovered that in their questionnaires, they actually
found out people's religious congregations, but they had never
analyzed (it). When we put those in the computers, we found that
despite the fact that people were of the same background - they were
not more educated or born to more affluent families - but they simply
had achieved more progress in their lifestyles than other categories.
So we did it by comparing statistical categories.